 Several of my key solutions to making our world better -- Natural Enterprises, True Collaboration and Model Intentional Communities
most notably -- rely on the ability of groups of people to self-manage
more effectively than large hierarchical organizations are, or can be,
managed top-down. Derek Woolverton over at Technical Difficulties... commented on my post on WL Gore ("no ranks, no titles, no bosses")
that self-managed organizations, if they don't have any rules, can be
much worse than badly-managed ones. He sent me a link to a manifesto
written back in 1970 by Jo Freeman called The Tyranny of Structurelessness,
lamenting how the women's liberation movement of that day had
degenerated into anarchy, cliquishness and petty politics for exactly
that reason. Her article lays out these seven principles of democratic
structuring for self-managed organizations:
- Delegate specific authority to specific individuals for
specific tasks by democratic procedures, after they've expressed an
interest or willingness to do it. Don't just let people choose their
own jobs.
- Require all those to whom authority has been delegated to be
responsible to all those who selected them. The group retains the ultimate say over
how the power is exercised.
- Distribute authority among as many people as is reasonably
possible, to prevent monopoly of power and encourage learning and consultation.
- Rotate tasks among individuals often but not too often, so people learn many jobs adequately and to avoid turf wars.
- Allocate tasks using objective criteria: competency,
interest, responsibility, and opportunity to learn new things with
appropriate mentoring.
- Diffuse information to everyone in the organization as frequently as possible. The more one
knows about how things work, the more politically effective one can
be.
- Provide equal access to resources (equipment, skills and information) needed by the group.
Freeman's manifesto is dated, but these principles make sense when
dealing with the proclivity (I think it's learned, so I won't say
'natural tendency') of people in groups to dominate, bully, gang up,
hoard, compete, take perverse pleasure in others' failure, and do
things without adequate consultation.
My question is whether you can get people to follow these principles.
If you have to impose them on the group, haven't you already made the
group less democratic by that imposition? And can you impose them on a group?
My (admittedly idealistic) proposal in Natural Enterprise is that self-selection
of the group should prevent these problems from occurring in the first
place. Those who are disinclined to work for someone who tends to want
to dominate will select the dominant types out of the group. Those who
want to be dominated, to be told what to do and how to do it, will
self-select into groups that include that type of individual.
Furthermore, in Natural Enterprise, the self-selecting group's first
task is to set out the mutually agreeable principles by which it will
operate. Of course, this is a learning process, one that will be very
new to most of us, so it should not be surprising that it takes some
time for the self-selection process to work. In its early days, every
Natural Enterprise will be expelling those who didn't work out,
allowing others who didn't understand what they were getting into to
select themselves out, and others to be invited or opt in in their
place. Every system is messy when it first begins. And I have a great
belief in instinct -- it is rare when my first instinctive impression
of a work colleague, positive or negative, has proven dead wrong.
Nature has given us this marvelous gift of instinct to make the process
of group self-selection easier and more reliable.
In the aforementioned article on collaboration I described a four-step
program for True Collaboration: teaching it as a core skill,
recognizing and rewarding its successes, self-assessing our competency
at it, and practice, practice, practice. I have seen domineering people
humbled by this process, but I have also seen egotistical, inflexible
and unimaginative leaders completely ignore brilliant collaborative
work-products. I'm the first to confess that collaboration is not
currently something most of us do well, but I believe strongly that it
works, makes us stronger and more resilient and adaptable as a species,
and that for that reason the ability to do it well should be in our genes.
But I have also seen petty despots and cliques who have ruined the
communities and organizations they preside over, even though some of
them were elected by a majority and believe fervently that they're
acting in the majority's interest, by minimizing their diversity (in
every sense of the word) and essentially expelling anyone with
different views. And I've seen dictators and cult leaders who rule with
an iron fist, some of whom are extraordinarily popular, even revered,
despite flagrantly violating these principles of democracy,
egalitarianism and collaboration.
Are these behaviours -- excessive dominance, bullying, ganging up,
hoarding resources, competing instead of collaborating, and doing
things without consulting others -- unlearnable?
And how about the behaviours that make these foolish behaviours
possible -- others' submissiveness, cowardice, self-victimization,
self-isolation, passivity, meekness, resignation -- can they be
unlearned too? Is it naive and unrealistic to think that we all have
something valuable to contribute, we all instinctively seek and belong
to communities, and, given a chance, we could and would all participate
as equals in every community and organization to which we belong?
I appreciate that nature has endowed us with dominant and submissive
genes, to establish a natural pecking order so that, even without
language, we can maintain order in our groups. But in nature there is
enormous collaboration and sharing of resources, infinitely more peace
and equality and less suffering than we find in most human
institutions. I'm not saying we need to learn to be exactly equal, just
that by 'ousting the egos and outing the wallflowers', we need to learn
to be more egalitarian.
I'd love to know more about how WL Gore really works, and how it
doesn't work (Derek suggests the power vacuum spawns horrendous
political infighting and undemocratic decision-making). Anyone know
people working at Gore, or other organizations with 'no ranks, no
titles, no bosses', who could share their lessons learned?
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
